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124 Chronicles of the Cape Fear River

tall, shaggy man, in leather leggings and a tattered cloak of

Confederate gray, who was standing near me.

“Don’t it grow whar you come from?” asked the man, with
the usual inquisitiveness of thinly peopled regions. On learn-
ing that I was a stranger from the old country, he became ex-
ceedingly courteous, and told me that the moss I had inquired
about was very common in that State, and was much used by

the people for stuffing seats and cushions and bedding, being
first boiled to kill it. He said it seemed to feed upon the air.
You could take a handful and fling it over the branch of an-
other tree, and it would grow all the same.

After a sail of some hours we reached a point from which a
railway runs in a southwesterly direction, traversing part of
the “Scotch Country.” Here we got into “cars,” and were soon
bowling through the lonely forest on the narrow iron bed, some-
times over tracks that were irregularly covered for miles with
still water, in which the trees and bushes that rose from it stood
reflected as on the bosom of a lake. Now and then, at long
intervals, we stopped at some little wayside station in the forest,
with its cheerful signs of human life, its casks of turpentine and
its piles of corded wood, around which the pines were being
hewn down and cut, some of them into bars, others into cheese-
like sections, for splitting into the shingles that are used for
roofing instead of slates or tiles. Occasionally the train stopped

in places where there was no station at all, to let some one out
at the part of the forest nearest to his home. The conductor,

who was continually passing up and down through the cars,
stopped the train, whenever necessary, by pulling the cord that
is slung along the roof of all American trains and communicates
with the engine.

We now began to get up into the higher country, amongst
forests of giant pines, where the ground was rough, and where
the sandy soil, looking in some places like patches of snow
seemed, for the most part, untouched by the hand of man. It
was into these vast solitudes, of which we had as yet but touched
the skirt, that the Highlanders, driven from their native land

during the religious and political troubles of the last century
had come to find a home.

North Carolina was long a favorite field for Highland emi-
gration. More than a hundred and forty years ago, when
Alexander Clark, of Jura, went out to North Carolina and

made his way up the Cape Fear River to Cross Creek, he found

The Revolution 125

already there one Hector McNeill, (known as “Bluff” Hector,
from his occupying the bluffs over the river,) who told him of
many others settled farther back, most of them exiles from Scot-
land, consequent on the troubles that followed the downfall of
the Stuarts, some of them Macdonalds who had been fugitives
from the massacre of Glencoe. The numbers were largely in-
creased by the failure of the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745. The
persecution to which the Highlanders were subjected after the
scattering of the clans at Culloden made many of them eager to
escape from the country; and when the government, after the
execution of many captured rebels, granted pardon to the rest
on condition of their taking the oath of allegiance and emigrat-
ing to the plantations of America, great numbers availed them-
selves of the opportunity. They were followed gradually by
many of their kith and kin, till the vast plains and forest lands
in the heart of North Carolina were sprinkled with a Gaelic-
speaking population.

In 1775, the Scotch colony received a memorable accession
in the person of Flora Macdonald, who, with her husband and
children, had left Scotland in poverty to seek a home with their
friends in the American forests. The heroine was received at
Wilmington! and at various points along her route with High-
land honors; and the martial airs of her native land greeted

her as she approached Cross Creek, the little capital of the .

Highland settlement. She arrived, however, at an unhappy
time. The troubles between Great Britain and the colonies
were coming to a head, and in a few months hostilities began.

It is somewhat singular that many of these Highland colon-
ists, the very men who had fought against the Hanoverian
dynasty at home, were now forward to array themselves on its
side. But they had been Jacobites and Conservatives in Scot-
land, and conservatism in America meant loyalty to the King.
Many of them, however, espoused the cause of independence,
and the declaration prepared in the county of Cumberland,
immediately after the famous declaration of the neighboring
county of Mecklenburg, has many Highland names attached.
The crafty Governor, fearing the spread of anti-British senti-
ment, and knowing the influence of Flora Macdonald amongst
the Scottish settlers, commissioned one of her kinsfolk, Donald
Macdonald, who had been an officer in the Prince’s army in

1At Wilmington a public ball was given in her honor.

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